A few days ago we took care of the great success that bitcoin ATMs are having globally and we explained how the bulk of these devices are installed in the USA; it is therefore not surprising that the IRS (which stands for Internal Revenue Service) is investigating these ATMs to make sure they are not used in illegal activities. This was reported by Bloomberg in an article a few days ago, taken up more recently by CoinDesk, which explains that BTM (as bitcoin ATMs are called, to distinguish them from ATMs) could potentially facilitate crimes such as money laundering and 'tax evasion. The source cited by Bloomberg is of the utmost reliability, it is indeed Jhon Fort, responsible for criminal investigations at the IRS, which stated that:

Since these devices allow you to exchange FIAT currency for bitcoins we are obviously interested in knowing the identity of the person who uses the BTM and what the source of those funds is, but this also clearly concerns the same company that manages the ATM

In any case in the USA the large part of the BTMs distributed on the territory are attributable to companies that operate in an absolutely legal manner, that are in possession of the necessary licenses to do so and that therefore fully satisfy the KYC, that is they identify the user for the purpose of allowing the normal activity of combating money laundering, however there have already been cases where the authorities have discovered that the BTMs were actually run by criminals; one of the most recent, which we also dealt with on this site, concerns an operation by the Spanish police from which it emerged that to manage some bitcoin ATMs was a criminal association dedicated to drug dealing which then used these devices for to recycle the money resulting from criminal activity. Even if this could not happen in the USA, because a license is needed to install the BTMs, the IRS has the doubt that some companies are actually circumventing what is provided for by the regulations in force by applying different levels of compliance with the regulations; in practice, as reported by Fort, the doubt that the US authorities have is that some companies, in certain cases, fail to verify the identity of the user, favoring money laundering. As reported by Bloomberg, however, at this moment there are no concrete cases opened by the IRS but only investigations in progress that, apparently, would not have been able to prove illicit of any kind; however, Fort says that the IRS has also put foreign trade under the microscope, fearing that while companies with legal headquarters in the US comply with all the laws required by US laws, users are turning to foreign exchanges that are not as strict in fulfilling legal obligations.

I talked about the bitcoin atm here too: link